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La Bête républicaine

Christopher Prendergast, 5 September 1996

The Dreyfus Affair: ‘J’Accuse’ and Other Writings 
by Emile Zola, edited by Alain Pagès, translated by Eleanor Levieux.
Yale, 208 pp., £25, June 1996, 0 300 06689 9
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Zola: A Life 
by Frederick Brown.
Farrar, Straus, 888 pp., £37.50, May 1996, 0 374 29742 8
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... the Republic. Zola was fully conscious of his role as public intellectual, citing the precedent of Victor Hugo: ‘If such an odious deed had been done in Hugo’s time, he would have thundered with the voice of justice and defended the people’s rights.’ Zola, too, thunders, passionately, magisterially, amid the ...

Who invented Vercingétorix?

Julian Jackson: French national identity, 27 June 2002

Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire. Volume I: The State 
by Pierre Nora, translated by Mary Trouille.
Chicago, 475 pp., £25, October 2001, 0 226 59132 8
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... combined to create a veritable factory of national memory. The real inventors of France are Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand, and historians like Michelet, Guizot and the Thierry brothers. The Gauls took centre stage in 1828 thanks to a book by Amédée Thierry. Then in 1865 Vercingétorix (originally an invention of Julius Caesar, who needed to ...

Diary

Michel Lechat: Graham Greene at the Leproserie, 2 August 2007

... Rabelais and Saint John the Baptist, as well as Chesterton, Mao Zedong, Maurice Barrès and Victor Hugo. In this orgy of comparisons and endorsements, the Dibamba/Yonda contest is an insignificant and almost ludicrous footnote. I wrote to reassure him: Please do not worry about the Douala article . . . It could well be that the léproseries in ...

Troglodytes

Patrick Parrinder, 25 October 1990

Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society and the Imagination 
by Rosalind Williams.
MIT, 265 pp., £22.50, March 1990, 9780262231459
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The Mask of the Prophet: The Extraordinary Fictions of Jules Verne 
by Andrew Martin.
Oxford, 222 pp., £27.50, May 1990, 0 19 815798 3
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... is the idea of the social ‘underworld’ of criminals and slum-dwellers, which is attributed to Victor Hugo in Les Misérables. After Hugo, every fictional underground journey is also a social journey, a descent into man-made abysses or into the lower depths of a circumscribed society. Here is Wells, in a youthful ...

What is concrete?

Michael Wood: Erich Auerbach, 5 March 2015

Time, History and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach 
by Erich Auerbach, edited by James Porter, translated by Jane Newman.
Princeton, 284 pp., £27.95, December 2013, 978 0 691 13711 7
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... possible to miss the real in this sense, to get it wrong, or not care about it. As Auerbach thinks Victor Hugo, for example, doesn’t care about it, he just enjoys mixing ‘the sublime and grotesque’. It’s also possible for the reader or viewer to disagree about whether the real is present or not in any particular set of words or images. I think ...

Never mind the neighbours

Margaret Anne Doody, 4 April 1996

Delphine 
by Germaine de Staël, translated by Avriel Goldberger.
Northern Illinois, 468 pp., $50, September 1995, 0 87580 200 1
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... intertwined with the events and ideas of a particular historical time. Like Tolstoy – or like Victor Hugo – she deals with both banal and terrible conditions, following her hero and heroine into the rough tribunal, where Delphine pleads for her friend as Germaine de Staël once, more successfully, had pleaded for a friend of her own. Like ...

E Bada!

Rye Dag Holmboe: What Isou Did to Language, 21 July 2022

Speaking East: The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou 
by Andrew Hussey.
Reaktion, 328 pp., £20, September 2021, 978 1 78914 492 5
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... sent and received. For Isou, such comprehensibility was almost as outdated as the writings of Victor Hugo, the paintings of Delacroix or the music of Wagner: art should represent nothing other than the medium itself, radically deformed.Ion-Isidor Goldstein was born in 1925 in the town of Botoșani in north-east Romania. His father, Jindrich, was a ...

Omnipresent Eye

Patrick Wright: The Nixon/Mao Show, 16 August 2007

Seize the Hour: When Nixon Met Mao 
by Margaret MacMillan.
Murray, 384 pp., £25, October 2006, 0 7195 6522 7
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... idea of China as a flowery vegetable kingdom where time stood still: a ‘land of embryos’, as Victor Hugo put it, where all signs of innovation were arrested on conception. Seize the Hour is a very suggestive study of the theatricalisation of perceptions that was such a pronounced feature of the Cold War. Nixon knows that he is in Beijing, but he is ...

We’ll win or lose it here

Robert F. Worth: Lessons from Tahrir Square, 21 September 2017

The City Always Wins 
by Omar Robert Hamilton.
Faber, 312 pp., £14.99, August 2017, 978 0 571 33517 6
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Chronicle of a Last Summer: A Novel of Egypt 
by Yasmine El Rashidi.
Tim Duggan, 181 pp., £11.70, June 2017, 978 0 7704 3729 9
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... risk putting themselves in competition with historians, who are usually accorded more patience. Victor Hugo would be forgotten today if all he had written was Ninety-Three, his fictional version of the Terror and the Vendée rebellion (though the book made a deep impression on the young Stalin, for reasons that now seem too easy to imagine). Egypt’s ...

A City of Sand and Puddles

Julian Barnes: Paris, 22 April 2010

Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris 
by Graham Robb.
Picador, 476 pp., £18.99, April 2010, 978 0 330 45244 1
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The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps 
by Eric Hazan, translated by David Fernbach.
Verso, 384 pp., £20, February 2010, 978 1 84467 411 4
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... which Paris regularly spawns: Hemingway at the Ritz bar, Sartre at the Deux Magots, Balzac and Victor Hugo practically everywhere – here we go again. It’s partly that the Francophile tends not to absorb Paris in a head-on fashion. Instead, it comes at us constantly through novels, paintings, opera, cinema, chansons, popular mythology ...

Italy Stirs

Adrian Lyttelton, 22 June 1995

Mazzini 
by Denis Mack Smith.
Yale, 302 pp., £19.95, April 1994, 0 300 05884 5
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Verdi: A Biography 
by Mary Jane Phillips-Matz.
Oxford, 941 pp., £30, October 1993, 0 19 313204 4
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The Real Traviata 
by Gaia Servadio.
Hodder, 290 pp., £20, October 1994, 9780340579480
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... like many former republicans, Verdi turned in disillusionment towards the Piedmont of Cavour and Victor Emmanuel as the only hope for Italian independence. In 1861, Cavour persuaded a reluctant Verdi to stand for Parliament. The two men shared a realistic, hard-headed business sense and a keen interest in agricultural improvements. Phillips-Matz makes clear ...

Mother’s Boys

David A. Bell, 10 June 1993

The Family Romance of the French Revolution 
by Lynn Hunt.
Routledge, 220 pp., £19.99, September 1992, 0 415 08236 6
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... and repulsive, exert a continuing fascination because of the seeming purity of their beliefs, what Victor Hugo in his novel Ninety-Three called ‘the blind certitude of the arrow that sees nothing but the target and flies straight there’. Because of this fascination, there is always temptation to take their words as evidence of a deep collective ...

Who mended Pierre’s leg?

David A. Bell: Lourdes, 11 November 1999

Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age 
by Ruth Harris.
Allen Lane, 473 pp., £25, April 1999, 0 7139 9186 0
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... to treatment with Lourdes water. His Notre-Dame de Lourdes sold over a million copies: more than Victor Hugo, Jules Verne or Alexandre Dumas; more probably than any other book published in France in the 19th century. It ran to 142 editions in just seven years; was translated into 80 languages and remained in print until the Sixties. It did so well ...

Mendès

R.W. Johnson, 20 June 1985

Pierre Mendès France 
by Jean Lacouture, translated by George Holoch.
Holmes & Meier, 486 pp., $34.50, December 1984, 0 8419 0856 7
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... merely the supreme example of a modern technocrat, but he was more than that: the heir of Danton, Victor Hugo and Jaurès, the voice of republican conscience in the 20th century, the voice of the Dreyfusards. While that spirit lives, Mendès will be ...

Leave me my illusions

Nicholas Penny: Antiquarianism, 29 July 2021

Time’s Witness: History in the Age of Romanticism 
by Rosemary Hill.
Allen Lane, 390 pp., £25, June, 978 1 84614 312 0
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... them and their often disparate specialities have never previously been explored. Walter Scott and Victor Hugo feature among the less familiar scholars, and some painters, including Bonnington and Delacroix, make brief appearances. As these names suggest, Hill has much to tell us about Anglo-French relations, present as well as past.We learn, for ...

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